The Stage

Carmen Jones

Published Wednesday 1 August 2007 at 10:25 by Mark Shenton

Bizet’s Carmen is being revived at ENO in September in a new production to be staged by film director Sally Potter, but ahead of that, this summer has already seen the return of Matthew Bourne’s 2000 “dansical” The Car Man which is based on it. Now the Southbank Centre is putting down a marker as a producer of its own work by reviving Carmen Jones, Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1943 Broadway re-write which transposes Bizet to an African-American setting.

But while it certainly luxuriates in the sound of a 55-strong onstage orchestra (alternately provided by the London Philharmonic and Philharmonia Orchestras, two of the Festival Hall’s four resident companies), Jude Kelly’s inaugural production as artistic director here exposes both the hall’s limitations in providing a home for musicals and her own as a director of them.

With no wing space or flying grid and an always-visible back wall, designer Michael Vale has created a fixed set that has an incomplete, cheesy theme park-like street at the rear. With the stage dominated by the large orchestra, there’s only a narrow forestage runway in front of them for close-up moments, while Kelly has her teeming cast populate the rear stage with more generalised activity.

As a result, the production has more external life than an internal one. Unlike Trevor Nunn’s recent Porgy and Bess, it fails to create a sense of a grounded community that the drama springs from. Things aren’t helped by the muddy sound, particularly during book scenes.

But it is, at least, frequently ravishingly sung. Indeed, it might have been an idea to ditch the rudimentary staging altogether and turn it into the concert staging it is crying out to be. In the title role, Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi wears a mane of startled hair (quite different to the publicity images for the show) that looks as if it has been plugged into the national grid, and her shimmering, dramatic soprano could clearly power it.

There is robust support from real-life brothers Andrew and Rodney Clarke as Joe, and Husky Miller, the two men in her life, while Sherry Boone’s Cindy Lou, pining endlessly for Joe whom she has lost to Carmen, also brings an aching vulnerability to her great aria My Joe. Former X-Factor finalist Brenda Edwards seeks to “beat out dat rhythm on a drum” with dazzling power, but the production elsewhere misses the dramatic beat and staging rhythm to fully engage.